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Jenna Bush Hager Partners With Random HouseTHOUSAND VOICES x RHPG is a new venture from two big names in books, the data behind the whiteness of Goodreads, and more. |
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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Jenna Bush Hager Partners With Random House
Jenna Bush Hager is partnering up with Random House Publishing Group for a new venture, THOUSAND VOICES x RHPG. What’s interesting about this is that instead of creating yet another imprint attached to a big name, the influential Read with Jenna book club creator will work with debut authors and RHPG’s existing imprints to bring new voices to readers. Hager lending her own voice to the marketing and publicity of the books she selects certainly won’t hurt sales for those books, so debut authors who don’t have established connections to the literary world or a big following could stand to greatly benefit from the built-in publicity machine that is Hager. Looking at the first six books she acquired, I’m not seeing much (any?) diversity, so I’m hoping that’ll change as more books are acquired under the venture.
Wattpad Adaptations Ranked From Most Harmful to Surprisingly Uplifting
Vulture ranked every Wattpad adaptation to make it to the small and big screen . In case you’re unfamiliar, Wattpad is an online publishing and reading platform where anyone can share their stories and get feedback from readers and fellow writers. I remember various headlines about Wattpad stories getting bought up by studios but I am admittedly not the audience for these stories so I never fell down that rabbit hole. I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that at present a host of Wattpad adaptations are now available to seekers of a certain kind of romantic tale–fans of Colleen Hoover perhaps–enough of them to pull together a list of 20 adaptations ranked “from the most obnoxious and harmful to the surprisingly pleasant and uplifting.” I cannot claim to be at all interested in #20 (a cartoon representation of an erection… really?), but I could be here for picturesque Canada and Taiwanese rep in #1.
Ronan Farrow Signs Multi-Project Deal With Audible
The Catch and Kill author will produce a series of podcasts made available exclusively on Audible . The first podcast, “Not a Very Good Murderer,” slated to release March 20th, is described as a true crime thriller and investigative story about “a series of cold cases in one of America’s wealthiest gated communities.” Farrow isn’t new to podcasting–his audio series spinoff “The Catch and Kill Podcast” was a success and he’s received awards for both podcasting and audio narration. I wish him the best of success with his venture while also maintaining a sense of déjà vu with Farrow’s name back in the headlines. It’s like the past four years never happened.
The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards
Kelly dives deep into the data around the Goodreads Choice Awards to illustrate how white both the Goodreads audience and so its awards are. In Kelly’s words: “The platform is dominated by white users and as a result, the Goodreads Choice Awards reflect back a whiteness that is not only unrepresentative of the year in publishing but fails to acknowledge a decade’s worth of work on increasing the visibility of diversity throughout the book world.” I haven’t paid much attention to the Choice Awards for this very reason, but seeing the data really exposes the sheer lack of representation on that platform.
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